Dave Martin, Getty Images
Well, frumps, a while back when Sarah Palin decided to quit her day job to devote more time to her Facebook page, I really believed that we had seen the end of Sarah-belle outside of the pages of People magazine. I fully expected her to take up full time fishing or moose hunting or antler crafts, with an occasional guest spot on talk radio, maybe. No such luck. She’s baaaaaaack . . .
And the most amazing thing of all is that she’s graduated from sideshow to center ring. Her name is actually topping the list of Republicans that might make a credible run for the GOP nomination in 2012. There are also a whole host of odd, circumstantial reasons why we might actually see the name Palin on 2012 ballots, not the least of which is the fact that the GOP base is so splintered into doctrinaire little cults that have no real-world chance of cohering into something with wide voter appeal.
Unfortunately, the GOP has turned a corner, in my opinion, and is ripe for a clueless demagogue like Palin. If Obama is portrayed as an unemotional elitist, (or worse, as an uppity black man), then the Republican base, already encouraged by the likes of Bachmann & Co. to become radically reactionary, will cheerfully follow a populist demagogue like Sarah Palin into oblivion. I guess, as a Democrat that should make me giddy. After all, it might be a political absurdity powerful enough to re-energize the electorate that voted for Obama and then left town.
The Grassroots Effect
But Sarah Palin’s ascendency is a symptom of something gone seriously wrong in the American body politic that needs attention. There seems to be a wave of populist disgruntlement that is increasingly non-partisan. Polling is producing odder and odder results. Americans of all ideological persuasions seem to be fed up with the US government as an entity. Republicans were happy to claim the early Tea Party angst as their own because it appeared to be Obama-backlash. As time went on, however, many Tea Party groups made it clear to the GOP that they were not exactly thrilled with Republicans, either.
The Tea Party movement has plenty of energy and emotion that focuses primarily on what they don’t like about a laundry list of issues. What they don’t seem to have is any clear vision of what they stand FOR outside of some overly romantic utopian notions of a return to Early American values that they clearly misread and misunderstand. The right kind of leader might be able to harness some of that conservative populist fervor but all indications are that the GOP is too enamored of Ronald Reagan to conceive of anything new.
It’s a mystery, to me, how or why Republicans have canonized Reagan because, truly, he played a starring role in setting the GOP on the slippery slope to their current state of disarray. Reagan focused conservative fury on government bureaucrats and Pat Buchanan, doing Reagan one better, redirected that populist anger against corporate elites. In 2000, John McCain mounted a crusade against the K Street lobbyists and almost won the GOP nomination as a result. The Republicans, at that point, had completely subverted conservative populism from their weapon for combating the Left Wing and were, incomprehensibly, busily firing away at their own financial base.
The GOP has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to discover what kind of party it wants to be after being Bush-whacked. That has been painfully obvious this past year and with the return of Palin, it’s bound to get worse. After Bush departed, the GOP had a perfect opportunity to “clean-slate” it and re-invent themselves. Instead, they’ve further deteriorated into self-serving, self-indulgent obstructionists who wear their smug cluelessness proudly like a badge of honor. The GOP has literally “fiddled while America burned.”
There is a painfully obvious platform and leadership vacuum in today’s GOP that is dangerously close to being filled by either greater mediocrity or the Palin Personality Cult. The few Republicans who have made any sort of faint protest against the GOP’s hijacking by brash ideologues and outright crazies have been quickly shouted down and labeled “RINOs” – Republicans in Name Only – as if anyone really knew what it means to be a “real” Republican, today.
David Brooks is one conservative, recently who has pointed boldly at Sarah the Rogue and declared that the empress is stark naked. This is one of the rare occasions on which I agree, 100%, with David Brooks but I’m not sure why this revelation took so long to dawn on him because he certainly didn’t make a peep along these lines when La Palin was added to the McCain ticket. But do you think the party will listen?
Time For a New Game Plan
As Walter Shapiro pointed out in a great article in Politics Daily, today, the Republican’s style of “winner-take-all” primaries gives Palin an even better chance at the 2012 GOP nomination. Democrats have sworn off such primaries, in a spirit of fairness, which is why the Obama-Clinton battle for the nomination dragged out so long. But given the GOP style, if Palin can hold 35% support among multiple candidates, she could pull it off, despite the fact that 71% of responders in a recent CNN/Opinion Research poll found Palin “not qualified to be President.”
All of those factors to consider lead, inevitably, to the horrifying “what-ifs” of a Palin presidency. Now that’s what I call fear-mongering. Despite Rush Limbaugh’s endorsement of Going Rogue as “truly one of the most substantive policy books I’ve read” that comment says more about Rushbo’s reading habits than it does about Sarah Palin’s “policy” smarts.
Seriously, has anyone heard anything “substantive” come out of Palin on, say, actual issues? Like jobs? Or the economy? Or Foreign policy? Or Climate Change? Or Health care reform (outside of her endless riffs about death panels)? I’m sorry Rush, but a saucy little, fact-challenged campaign trail memoir that trashes the campaign and most of the media types who covered it sounds more like a gossip column vendetta than a political “must read” to me.
The Palin Presidency is a chilling prospect to me and I’d bet my life that it’s keeping a few Republicans up at night, too. I wouldn’t be too shocked if we start to see some GOP maneuvering to put the kibosh to Palin before her fan club gathers any more steam or propels her much further. I think the Republicans are too anemic a party, right now, to effectively handle Palin if she gets too far ahead of them, though. I’m also afraid that they won’t be able to resist keeping some Palin-power around in case they need a jumpstart for the 2010 mid-term elections. That is, if there’s anyone out there that isn’t afraid of getting Scozzafava-ed in the process.
As Shapiro points out, there are a couple of things that the party could do to stop Palin. Their winner-take-all primary strategy is not set in stone, they’ve just always had an aversion to long-drawn out primaries. Major electoral states could decide to change their rules about awarding convention delegates. Or, the party leadership could unite behind one strong anti-Palin candidate. Political egos and the splintered nature of the GOP make that an unlikely scenario, though.
So, it could very well turn out that Sarah Palin will be “God’s gift to the Democratic Party” as Brent Budowsky put it in his article on The Hill this morning.
Technorati Tags: Sarah Palin, Going Rogue, GOP, Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, David Brooks, Walter Shapiro, Politics Daily, The Hill
